Pentax Optio 330GS Review

Overall Rating

Good all round camera, excellent value, quick and easy to use.

Auto setting for white balance should work better with artificial lighting indoors.

I bought this camera a few days ago. This is an excellent camera, small enough to slip into a shirt pocket, but controls that aren't too small. Takes excellent pictures outdoors and good flash shots indoors. In fact, this camera has an excellent flash (in most situations), with both good coverage and pretty good anti-redeye. It is also stronger than most in this size camera, easily covering 5m at wide angle and 3m at the tele end. There is a focus assist lamp which comes into play in poor lighting (almost undocumented). While this can slow things down a bit, you can always pre-focus or switch to manual focus. Incedentally, the Standard mode restricts shooting to 1/4s. I cannot find reference to this in the documentation. Night-scen mode works well, rendering 4s shots at 400 ASA (if you set it) that are brighter than you perceive with your own eyes. The fold-out viewing screen is a nice feature for family group-shots, including yourself. It's surprising how easy it is to see the count down of the self-timer using this screen. There are plenty of of other manual controls to keep most people happy and the menu system is easy to master. Download of files to my PC via the USB cable extremely quick. The only vices are quite minor. The manual focus scale is not graduated, and I find it hard to focus based on the image displayed on the LCD. A simple scale would have been useful. The 'Auto' setting for white balnce does not cope too well when shooting with indoor lighting and no flash. You need to select the 'Tungsten Light' setting. Also the flash may not throttle down adequately for really close flash work. I'm talking about distances of 10 to 15 cm here. Setting exposure compensation to -2EV gets part of the way there, but the old trick of slipping a little bit of white paper over the falsh unit (without obscuring the sensor) works perfectly. I would recommended this camera to anyone. You can pick it up this 3MP camera for the price of many 2MP cameras. It has a good range of features and does most things well. A great little camera at a fantastic price.